A despairing stab at writing a vaguely interesting blog about stuff.

Month: June 2017

Ah no, not Maggie. Maggie May is just a song by Rod Stewart. You thought you were a Maggie Mk II (that Maggie), but you’re just a poor imitation, a sort of Poundshop Thatcher. Sure, there are the snazzy M&S suits and the occasional blue handbag, but the similarities end there, I’m afraid. All soundbite over substance, as Mr. Blair wouldn’t say.

So, Dear Theresa

Voters, eh? Bloody hell!

Pollsters, eh? Double bloody hell!

Your face was a picture on Friday. It reminded me of the face of Boris’s on June 23rd last year. Nasty surprises are always more entertaining for everyone else, of course, but I’m not getting a sympathetic vibe for you from anyone: right now I’d say you are about as popular as the Pope in a Loyalist pub in Belfast.

Speaking of which, it must be pretty galling having to do a deal with Britain’s answer to the Westboro Baptist Church. So when you criticised Jeremy Corbyn (well, when your mates in the press did) for his dialogue with the IRA in the 80s, what we didn’t realise at the time was that it was only his particular choice of Northern Irish extremists that irked you. So long as they have a Union Jack in their logo, their batshit creationism, anti-abortion and anti-gay rhetoric, and former links to UDA paramilitaries are all tickety boo, presumably.

Have you tried the bacon sandwiches? Deliciously strong and stable.

And those nice people in the Dinosaur Unionist Party will take some bribing negotiating with, won’t they? They’ll want shiny new hospitals and roads and whatnot. But that’s OK because we can just pay for it with your magic money tree. You know, the one you kept banging on about during your ‘campaign’. That same awesome tree has just shelled out about 140 million for this political masterstroke almighty cock-up. Indeed, the electorate enjoyed it so much, we’ll probably have to splash 140m on another one later in the year. All of the above was impeccably costed in your ‘manifesto’, I’m sure.

There were a few other things you kept banging on about in your electrifying campaign. Something about stability, I think. And a red, white and blue Brexit. It sounds very whizzy. I’m sure it was meant to appeal to the youth who turned out to endorse it in record numbers. I mean they must have done, mustn’t they? Their heads can’t possibly have been turned by the chance to go to university without saddling themselves with large debts. Let no one say you have a tin ear for the wishes of the electorate.

And so you made the campaign all about you and your team – an understandable strategy given your charismatic personality, your soft skills, your warm rapport with the people.

This is a school and these are children, Theresa. Not lepers. Or Marxist saboteurs. HTH.

So it must have been more than a little annoying to see so many voters go for the other guy: Mr. Corbyn – an inoffensive looking chap who seemed to have wandered away absently from his allotment into the political maelstrom. You wasted no time in labelling him (or getting your nice friend Mr. Dacre to label him) ‘Jezbollah’ and a frightful Marxist. You even suggested that all his promises were an unaffordable wishlist of pie-in-the-sky nonsense that would wreck the economy. The trouble with this line is that your cherished Brexit is also an unaffordable bit of pie-in-the-sky nonsense that will wreck the economy, and so here we are.

But it was all worth it in the end, and that’s what counts, yes? What was it you wanted? A mandate. I recall there was a cheap, pungent 80s aftershave called Mandate. I used to wear it in the vain hope it would attract the opposite sex. Perhaps giving someone like you a mandate was similarly repulsive to too many voters, which is a real shame because when you’re not barking inanities about Brexit, you have one or two ideas which aren’t at all bad for a Tory. You got them from your adviser, the guy with the bushy beard, to be fair. Something about trying to protect industries in the Midlands and the North, and making the elderly make a greater contribution to the costs of their aged care rather than kicking the can down the road and dumping it all on the overworked and underpaid.

If Mr. Timothy had been a little more diplomatic in the way he pushed these policies, instead of infuriating your ‘colleagues’ in ‘TeamMay’ with his bullish ego and high-handed style, you might just have started a decent conversation on how on earth we’re going to support the old, and you might just have gone a little way to repairing some of the economic pain and decline suffered by those regions. You must remember that. It was wrought by your heroine, your idol, back in the good old days of the 80s when Tory majorities grew on trees and election campaigns were tiresome interludes to be endured. Instead, poor old Rasputin Nick’s political corpse is drifting in the Neva, an expendable victim of your ego.

It’s not Little Red Riding Hood, it’s the Big Bad (toothless) Wolf

So, what now? The proverbial glass of whisky and revolver in the library, I suppose. You could always console yourself with a quick listen to your Desert Island Discs choices. One of them was ABBA’s Dancing Queen: allow yourself one last wistful thought of gliding across the world’s stage in those kitten heels. A more fitting choice would be The Winner Takes It All. As the next line goes, the loser has to fall. And even though you ‘won’, you lost really.